Shadow Libraries is a collection of country studies exploring “how students get the materials they need.” Most chapters report original research (usually responses to student surveys) in addition to providing useful background on the shadow library history of each nation (Russia, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, India, Poland, and South Africa). As editor Karaganis puts it in his introduction, the book shows “the personal struggle to participate in global scientific and educational communities, and the recourse to a wide array of ad hoc strategies and networks when formal, authorized means are lacking… ” (p. 3). Shadow libraries, sometimes called pirate libraries, consist of texts (in this case, scholarly texts) aggregated outside the legal framework of copyright.

Karaganis’ introductory chapter does an excellent job summarizing the themes connecting the chapters, and is worth reading by itself. For example, the factors leading to the development of shadow libraries are common to each country covered: low income; a dysfunctional market in which materials either aren’t available or are overpriced; a rising student population; and easy access to copying and/or sharing technology. The student population boom in low and middle-income countries in the last 20 years is remarkable- quadrupling in India, tripling in Brazil, and doubling in Poland, Mexico, and South Africa. At the same time, reductions in state support for higher education have exacerbated the affordability problem, leaving the market to meet (or more commonly, not meet) demand. Add to this the tendency of publishers to price learning and research materials for libraries rather than individuals, and the result is a real crisis of legal access.

Due to the focus on student access to learning resources, there is less emphasis in Shadow Libraries on access to peer-reviewed articles and the best-known pirate library, Sci-Hub. However, Balázs Bodó presents two fascinating chapters on Library Genesis (LibGen) and how it was shaped by censorship and samizdat networks in Russia. Online, shadow libraries are usually distributed (and easily forked), have separate indexing and item hosting, and are invisible to search engines (instead shared by word of mouth). Other shadow libraries may be digital but not online, or in print. Digital materials are often obtained via the sharing of university passwords. In India, many materials are brought back by students studying in the U.S. or U.K. The aggregation of scholarly materials is a community practice in which “a large majority of students… are shadow librarians by necessity if not choice” (p. 206).

The student surveys show the predominance of photocopying (in Argentina and Brazil, 90% of students obtain materials this way). In many countries, “copy shops” in or near universities are ubiquitous, and students resort to other methods as well, such as taking photos of print materials (60% of respondents in Brazil). Though publishers target university libraries for sales, in countries like India, few libraries can afford academic databases, and they provide access to only a “small fraction of the number of journals typically received by U.S. universities” (p. 186).

While there are some positive trends underway (the spread of SciELO to South Africa, greater fair use for education in India, and the rise of open educational resources, or OER), the current situation seems surprisingly resistant to change. Indeed, access work-arounds only seem to reduce pressure on the system, as Karaganis notes:

“…the informal copying ecosystem operates as a safety valve… denying publishers the more complete markets they want but also forestalling a sharper crisis of access that might lead to a break with existing publishing and policy paradigms” (p. 11).

The book’s flaws are minor: some chapters go into more detail about a country’s copyright history than some readers may desire, and two chapters erroneously refer to U.S. fair use as limited to 10% of a resource. References sometimes lack persistent identifiers such as DOIs or handles, and cited websites lack archiving (for example, with the Wayback Machine or Perma.cc, which should become universal practice in scholarship).

Shadow Libraries is a superb and fascinating book that is recommended to everyone in higher education. As universities in wealthy countries emphasize international outreach (Virginia Tech is beginning to call itself a “global land-grant”), they should take into account access challenges around the world. Of course, to some degree the same challenges are also present in well-funded institutions (textbook costs are receiving increased attention, and as Bodó notes, developed countries are major sources of traffic for LibGen). Advancing university open access policies and creating OER can have impact on the crisis both locally and globally. Emphasizing openness over prestige would help as well, with researchers in South Africa, Brazil, and Poland pressured to publish in “top” journals that often aren’t available in their own countries. Such efforts would begin to remedy an academic environment that is “universalist in principle and unequal in practice” (p. 3). Shadow Libraries leads one to ask: given the importance of higher education, why isn’t access to research and learning resources easier?

As part of Open Access Week, the University Libraries and the Graduate School offered a travel scholarship to OpenCon 2018, a conference for early career researchers on open access, open data, and open educational resources. From a pool of many strong essay applications, we chose Diana M. Franco Duran, a Ph.D. candidate in Civil Engineering in the Construction Engineering and Management program. Diana attended the conference in Toronto, Canada on November 2-4, and sent the report below. Be sure to check out the OpenCon 2018 highlights.

Diana M. Franco Duran writes:

Diana M. Franco Duran

OpenCon is a community with a culture of openness that seeks everyone who can participate. It promotes an open, safe, and diverse space in which ideas are respected. This year, OpenCon focused the discussion on two main topics: 1) community as the foundation for culture change, and 2) diversity, equity, and inclusion in open research and education. The conference’s goal was to motivate the attendees to change the culture towards a more open research and educational system with diversity, inclusion, and equity.

Open research and open education are about more than sharing the work. Open research and open education are about people. There is no way to make research and education open if we do not know the community. The community must be engaged into the discussion, so we can discover how openness can help them do what they want to do. Openness as a problem solution must work in the context of the community.

During the workshops, two of the topics for discussion were 1) how to motivate students to incorporate open access in research related activities, and 2) how to reward open research and education in higher education institutions. It is important to communicate open access, open data, and open education to students as well as faculty, and to develop program policies/ strategies to incorporate any form of open access as an objective in the research of graduate students.

Do-a-thon at OpenCon 2018

From my point of view, open access, open data, and open research have become significant in higher education in the last few years. However, open education has not reached that status yet. There is still the misconception that open education is only sharing educational resources. Open education is the collaborative development of educational resources to provide everyone access to high-quality resources and experiences. As a younger generation, we live surrounded by technology and unlimited resources provided by the internet. Therefore, we have all the tools to make the academic environment relevant to others by giving them access to education and knowledge.

At OpenCon, the voices and stories of all attendees are heard. I personally connected to the story of one of the panelists, Adbullah Alghurabi, a master’s student in Canada, who developed educational resources for his community in Yemen. He translated scholarship opportunities into Arabic to help students find these opportunities. He also provided students with educational materials they needed to prepare for the TOEFL and IELTS exams that did not require internet access, since students in Yemen often lack an internet connection. Undoubtedly, these stories connect to others.

Thanks to this opportunity, I am now part of the team organizing the OpenCon Latin America 2019 which will be held in Colombia. We want to focus on open education and how it is related to open access and open data, highlighting the Latin American context.

Organizing team for OpenCon Latin America 2019

I am thankful that I had the opportunity to attend OpenCon 2018 and represent Virginia Tech. This is a space where I had the chance to get to know people from all over the world but also I had the opportunity to know how open data, open research, and open education are helping the community. Through the workshops, story circles, open reflections, do-a-thons, and unconferences, OpenCon offers a space to work together and shape ideas to contribute the community by considering openness as an inclusive solution.

The University Libraries at Virginia Tech is pleased to announce publication of Electromagnetics, Volume 1 by Steven W. Ellingson.

Electromagnetics, Volume 1 is a 225-page peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbook intended for use in a one-semester, first course in undergraduate engineering electromagnetics. This course is typically taken by electrical engineering students in the third year of a bachelor of science degree program. The open textbook is currently being used in Virginia Tech’s ECE 3105 Electromagnetic Fields course.

The book and its accompanying ancillary materials (problem sets, solution manual, and LaTeX source files) are open educational resources: freely available and openly licensed (CC BY SA 4.0). Freely downloadable versions are available at https://doi.org/10.21061/electromagnetics-vol-1. A softcover print version is available via Amazon.

Features of the book: The book is designed to resolve pressing instructional, technical and financial barriers faced by students and to provide instructors with flexibility in rearranging the text for preferred instructional sequences. By following best practices for open and digital textbook production, this book offers the following benefits:

Field tested content: Students were directly involved in field testing and in contributing figures. The text was used in multiple sections by different instructors. Students and instructors provided feedback and suggestions for improvement;

Features that enhance understanding: These include examples, highlighted concept boxes, discussion of notation (1.7) to reduce ambiguity, appendices on constitutive parameters of common materials, mathematical formulas, and physical constants, and end-of-chapter links to external reference information;

Supplementary learning materials: The book is accompanied by problem sets and worked solutions;

Reusable figures: All figures are openly licensed and may be redistributed with attribution. Many are available in .svg format in Wikimedia Commons;

Quality and clarity: The book is peer-reviewed and has undergone field testing, technical review, and professional copy editing;

Legal and no-cost access: Anyone with internet access can freely and legally access the text. This reduces financial pressure on students. Existing commercial texts in this field can retail new for as high as $200, or $100 for a one-semester rental;

Accessibility: Screen-reader friendly navigation structure, an index, and detailed, hyperlinked table of contents make it easier for readers to navigate within the text. All readers, and especially those with sight disabilities, benefit from alternative text “alt text” available for each figure;

Upfront permission to customize the text and figures: Adaptation and redistribution with attribution is allowed because of the book’s open license (CC BY SA); And,

Technical methods for customization: Users may create their own version of the text by modifying the LaTeX source. This gives flexibility to instructors who prefer to sequence course topics in a different order. Openly licensed LaTeX source files are available so that instructors and other authors may easily remix, reorder, or change the text in other ways.

Page 120 from Electromagnetics, Vol 1

Electromagnetics, Volume 1 is part of the Open Electromagnetics Project led by Steven W. Ellingson at Virginia Tech. The goal of the project is to create no-cost openly-licensed content for courses in undergraduate engineering electromagnetics. The project is motivated by two things: lowering learning material costs for students and giving instructors the freedom to adopt, modify, and improve their educational resources.

Electromagnetics Volume 2, which covers the second semester (ECE 3106) course is expected in January 2020.

About the author: Steven W. Ellingson (ellingson@vt.edu) is Associate Professor of Engineering at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia in the United States. He received PhD and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Ohio State University and a BS in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Clarkson University. He was employed by the US Army, Booz-Allen & Hamilton, Raytheon, and the Ohio State University ElectroScience Laboratory before joining the faculty of Virginia Tech, where he teaches courses in electromagnetics, radio frequency systems, wireless communications, and signal processing. His research includes topics in wireless communications, radio science, and radio frequency instrumentation. Ellingson serves as a consultant to industry and government and is the author of Radio Systems Engineering (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

A January 2018 blog post regarding the “beta,” field tested version of this book is available here.

Fair Use for Nonfiction Authors is the third in a series of short, helpful guides from the Authors Alliance (the first two were Understanding Open Access and Understanding Rights Reversion). The guide was created “to help nonfiction authors understand reasonable strategies for the application of fair use in common situations.” With the help of several scholarly societies, the authors distributed a survey which garnered the responses of 60 authors with nearly 150 fair use stories. In addition to the survey responses, the guide was also shaped by existing codes of best practice in various domains. Keep in mind that the concept of fair use is evolving, and that there are no clear tests of what is or is not fair use. Also, the guide applies only to fair use in the United States (and neither the book nor this blog post constitute legal advice).

Four factors must be considered to determine whether using a copyrighted work is a fair use: the nature of the use, the nature of the work used, how much of the work is used, and the economic effect of the use. Case law shows that judges tend to focus on two questions: whether the use was transformative, that is, was the use for a different purpose or did it give the material a different meaning; and was the material used appropriate in kind and amount?

The guide then goes on to cover three common situations encountered by nonfiction authors. The first is criticizing, discussing, or commenting on copyrighted material. This use is well established, but does have the following limitations: the amount used should be appropriate for the purpose; the use should be connected to the purpose; and reasonable attribution should be given to the author. While U.S. copyright law does not require attribution, courts may find it a factor in favor of fair use, and of course it is standard practice in scholarship.

The second common situation is using a copyrighted work to illustrate, support, or prove an argument or point (unlike the situation above, here the copyrighted work is not the object of commentary). This use is also well established, and shares the limitations above regarding attribution, the amount used, and a connection between the work and the point being made. An additional limitation in this situation is that a use should not be made if it is merely decorative or entertaining.

The third common situation is using copyrighted works for non-consumptive research, such as text and data mining. For this more recent situation, fair use is strongly supported by existing case law. One caveat, however, is that databases being used in this manner must not have any contractual restrictions on text and data mining. And the material should not be employed in other ways, such as reading normally, or providing access to works digitized by the researcher. Real-life examples of fair use appear for all three situations described above, as well as hypothetical cases to test your knowledge.

The FAQ section of the guide covers creative and commercial uses, options when permission is refused, fair use for unpublished works, and contractual limitations on fair use. Two questions of particular interest to researchers concern the re-use of figures, and the policies of journals and publishers that require permission for re-use of copyrighted work. In the case of figures, including charts, graphs, and tables, it is important to remember that facts are not copyrightable. Creatively expressed figures may be copyrightable; one must analyze each particular case according to the scenarios above. It is worth mentioning here that some forward-thinking researchers are eliminating the permissions ambiguity regarding their own figures by making them available separately under a Creative Commons license. Where publishers ignore fair use and require permissions to re-use copyrighted work, the guide recommends engaging with them to explain the rationale and referring them to a code of best practices where applicable. Where fair use is integral to a work, it will be worth finding a publisher willing to rely on it.

The section “Beyond Fair Use” provides the following suggestions if your intended use does not qualify as fair use:

Modify your intended use

Ask the owner for permission (which may include paying a license fee)

Use an openly licensed work

Use a work in the public domain

Fair Use for Nonfiction Authors is an open access book (licensed CC BY) available online in PDF. If you would prefer a print copy, you can order one ($20) from the Authors Alliance, or check out the copy in Newman Library. For more information, see the Authors Alliance fair use page, which in addition to the guide includes a FAQ, links to fair use resources, and fair use news.

Through June 15, the Authors Alliance has a crowdfunding campaign for an upcoming guide, Understanding Book Publication Contracts. If you would like help support that guide, please consider a contribution.

Virginia Tech is one of nine founding members of the Open Textbook Network Publishing Cooperative, a pilot program focused on publishing new, openly licensed textbooks. The program was launched by the Open Textbook Network (OTN) and aims to increase open textbook publishing experience in higher education institutions by training a designated project manager at each institution and creating a network of institutions.

The Cooperative is a three-year pilot that will establish publishing workflow and processes to expand the development of open textbook publishing in higher education. As a member, Virginia Tech’s project managers, Corinne Guimont (Digital Publishing Specialist) and Anita Walz (Open Education, Copyright and Scholarly Communications Librarian), will gain expertise in project management and technical skills. After the training is complete, a minimum of three open textbooks will be published using the model and tools gained through the cooperative.

“We at Virginia Tech are excited to join the Co-Op because of the opportunity for learning and professional development within a cohort of other institutions,” said Anita Walz. “We will have access to additional technical expertise, workflows, and tools, so that we can create and share more open textbooks with the world.”

Virginia Tech’s involvement in the Publishing Cooperative builds upon previous open textbooks published in the library, including Fundamentals of Business by Stephen J. Skripak and newly released Beta Version of Electromagnetics by Steven W. Ellingson. These books along with other open educational resources adopted by faculty at Virginia Tech have saved 3,111 students $786,398 in course material costs.

At the completion of the three-year pilot, the Publishing Cooperative as a whole will publish at least two dozen new, freely available, textbooks with Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licenses.

Founding members of the OTN Publishing Cooperativeinclude: Miami University, Penn State University, Portland State University, Southern Utah University, University of Cincinnati, University of Connecticut, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Virginia Tech, and West Hills Community College District (CA).

About the Open Textbook Network: The Open Textbook Network (OTN) is a community working to improve education through open education, with members representing over 600 higher education institutions. OTN institutions have saved students more than $8.5 million by implementing open education programs, and empowered faculty with the flexibility to customize course content to meet students’ learning needs.

VT Publishing and the University Libraries of Virginia Tech are pleased to announce publication of a second, new open textbook: Electromagnetics Volume 1 (Beta). (You can read about the first open textbook in an earlier blog post.) The textbook is in “beta” for a Virginia Tech course in Spring 2018 and will be revised and re-released with LaTeX source code, problem sets, and solutions in Summer 2018.

Electromagnetics Volume 1 (Beta) by Steven W. Ellingson is a 224 page, freely available, peer-reviewed, full color, print and digital open educational resource. It is intended to serve as a primary textbook for a one-semester first course in undergraduate engineering electromagnetics within the third year of a bachelor of science degree program.

The book is the work of Steven W. Ellingson, Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, in collaboration with the Scholarly Communication office of Virginia Tech’s University Libraries and VT Publishing. As collaborators with Ellingson, the University Libraries provided grant funding, overall project management, guidance on open licensing, attribution, student works, formats and styles, managed development and production processes, coordinated peer review, reviewed manuscripts (editorial and technical), provided technical specifications, and navigated print and distribution solutions.

A no cost downloadable version of Electromagnetics Volume 1 (Beta) is available here. A full color softcover printed version (ISBN: 978-0-9979201-2-3) is available at the cost of production and shipping from Amazon.com.

The LaTeX authored text includes extensive use of mathematical equations, figures, adapted, and custom-created and openly licensed diagrams, worked and narrative examples. This book employs the “transmission lines first” approach, one of three approaches to teaching electromagnetics. However, other teaching approaches may find the work relevant, since its release under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license legally allows addition, adaptation (with required attribution), and redistribution of content. The resulting work is of significant value in opening new possibilities for teaching and learning: Electromagnetics Volume 1 (Beta) by Ellingson is the first known openly licensed textbook for electromagnetics.

Electromagnetics Volume 1 (Beta) will be field tested in Virginia Tech’s ECE3106 Electromagnetic Fields course in Spring 2018, and then revised and re-released in Summer 2018 as a text adoptable for courses beyond Virginia Tech. LaTeX source files, problem sets, and solutions will be released contemporaneously in Summer 2018. The editor and author of this book encourage feedback from individuals, classes, and faculty viewing this book. Feedback and suggestions may be contributed using the online annotation tool Hypothes.is, via a feedback form, or by emailing publishing@vt.edu. A Volume 2 and combined Volumes 1 & 2 are planned.

The intent of creating a remixable book for both internal use and free public release exemplifies trends within the Open Education movement and in higher education in general. These trends mirror aspects of the open source software movement and include public sharing under open licenses which allow contributions and adaptation (such as Creative Commons licenses), rewarding, valuing, and incorporating new ideas pertaining to teaching and learning, building collaborative faculty networks across multiple institutions, giving credit where due, and involving students as active contributors to course goals and/or the work of curricula and course design. Free public access is a start, but the possibilities for faculty, students, and others to create, openly license and share, freely adopt, adapt with attribution, and build open source systems for adaptation and sharing expand meaningful possibilities far beyond free access. These freedoms bode well for expansion of purposeful and engaging teaching and learning, the ability to leverage academic freedoms for broad, positive impacts on the common good, thoughtful conversations about ethics, incentives, voice, and access in the academy, and the advancement of innovative pedagogical practices and publicly available scholarly research which are already beginning to bear fruit.

I hope that many other faculty and institutions will take advantage of opportunities to create, adopt, adapt, and share openly licensed materials to fit their needs, the distinctive teaching and learning challenges and opportunities in their disciplines, the needs of their students, and beyond.

This textbook is part of the Open Electromagnetics Project led by Steven W. Ellingson at Virginia Tech. The goal of the project is to create no-cost openly-licensed content for courses in undergraduate engineering electromagnetics. The project is motivated by two things: lowering learning material costs for students and giving faculty the freedom to adopt, modify, and improve their educational resources.

Publication of this book was made possible in part by the Virginia Tech University Libraries’ Open Education Faculty Initiative Grant program which is led by Anita Walz, Scholarly Communication office, at the University Libraries, Virginia Tech. The goal of the grants program is to to encourage the use, creation, and adaptation of openly licensed information resources to support student learning. The author also thanks VT Publishing colleagues for their many contributions.

About the author of Electromagnetics Volume 1 Beta: Steven W. Ellingson is an Associate Professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. He received PhD and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering from The Ohio State University and a BS in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Clarkson University. He was employed by the US Army, Booz-Allen & Hamilton, Raytheon, and The Ohio State University ElectroScience Laboratory before joining the faculty of Virginia Tech, where he teaches courses in electromagnetics, radio frequency systems, wireless communications, and signal processing. His research includes topics in wireless communications, radio science, and radio frequency instrumentation. Professor Ellingson serves as a consultant to industry and government and is the author of Radio Systems Engineering (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

As part of Open Access Week, the University Libraries and the Graduate School offered a travel scholarship to OpenCon 2017, a conference for early career researchers on open access, open data, and open educational resources. From a pool of many strong essay applications, we chose Alexis Villacis, a Ph.D. student in Agricultural and Applied Economics. Alexis attended the conference in Berlin, Germany on November 11-13, and sent the report below. Be sure to check out the OpenCon 2017 highlights.

Alexis (left) at an OpenCon workshop

Alexis Villacis writes:

The progress of science and access to education varies widely geographically, and sometimes are very limited due to economic, cultural and social circumstances. Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data are key to support those who are left behind and bring empowerment to the next generation. OpenCon brings together the worldwide champions who are working towards the advancement of the Open Movement. Students, early career academic professionals, and senior researchers all come together under one roof to share their initiatives. Participants hear their inspiring stories, from Canada to Nepal, of sparking change during a three-day conference; a conference I am grateful to have had the opportunity to be part of, as a representative of Virginia Tech.

Over these three days, participants showcased how Open is being advanced around the world. The discussion centered on how often higher education models (knowledge access, research questions, and research funding, among many others) marginalize underrepresented scholars and students. It was thought-provoking and sometimes shocking to hear how our western ways of knowing have colonized access to information and how this has impacted the progress of R&D in other parts of the world.

Sharing with participants from other countries and hearing the challenges they face every day made me contrast our everyday realities and the privilege we have at VT. A privilege we take for granted in our everyday lives, where access to all types of tools, research, and content is one click away through our computers. We, as an institution of higher education, promote and share access to knowledge and new technologies throughout Virginia and beyond. The impact of these transfers is what keeps our society thriving every day, but where would we be if this access were restricted to us? Perhaps, VT as a Land Grant Institution would not exist at all, the state of Virginia would not be what it is today and neither many other parts of the US.

As I walked through the halls of the Max Planck Society, where the conference was held, I kept wondering: is this not what we are doing today? What changes are we withholding from the rest of the world by limiting access to data, knowledge, and education? The essence of this and the significance of Open Access clearly goes beyond journals and data, and it is also about social justice, equity, and the democratization of knowledge. We Hokies can make a difference in Open Access. More importantly, we are the key players called to work towards its advancement.

As research becomes increasingly digital, it’s becoming more important to ensure a findable and unchanging scholarly record. Researchers are probably familiar with the digital object identifier (DOI), which in URL form provides a persistent link to articles (and more), and libraries and publishers provide redundant archiving to ensure scholarship is preserved for the long term.

However, it’s also important to make sure links (other than DOIs) in articles work, and to make sure web pages represent what the author saw when she cited them. Some journals are aware of these issues, and I’ve noticed a few authors who employ URLs from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine in their manuscripts. Thinking back to my last article, there are probably some links that won’t work five (or twenty) years from now, or links resolving to web pages that won’t accurately represent what I was referring to at the time.

To help address this problem, Virginia Tech’s University Libraries is pleased to announce that we are now a registrar for Perma.cc, a service to provide archiving of web pages for research purposes. Researchers at Virginia Tech will be able to archive, manage, and annotate an unlimited number of web pages with persistent shortlinks for citing, and will also receive local support.

Including a Perma.cc link in a citation or footnote may depend on the citation style you are using, but a general recommendation is to include the original URL, followed by “archived at” and the Perma.cc shortlink, for example:

If you click on the Perma.cc link above, you can see how the web page looks in archived form. In addition, the time of capture is recorded, there’s a link to the live page, and you can download the archive file (under “show record details”). Perma.cc is intended for non-commercial scholarly and research purposes that do not infringe or violate anyone’s copyright or other rights. Web pages to be archived should be freely available without payment or registration. Additionally, some web pages employ a “noarchive” restriction, which Perma.cc archives but makes private. In other words, the shortlink can be shared, but is available only to the researcher and upon request.

There are some advantages to using Perma.cc over the Wayback Machine (and the Internet Archive is a supporting partner of Perma.cc). Perma.cc provides a more thorough, accurate capture in two forms, a web archive file (WARC), and a screenshot (PNG). Perma.cc also provides persistent shortlinks that are more convenient for citing, and enables researcher management of the links (with folders, annotation, and public/private control).

Other features of the Perma.cc system include:

Researchers will be added as organizations, and can add other users within that organization, such as lab members or collaborators

To get started, send an email to permacc@vt.edu and request an account (or to be added as an unlimited user if you’ve already signed up). You can also send questions and problems to this address, or you can use the Perma.cc contact form.

Inspired by the Association of Southeastern Regional Libraries webinar, “Adding Patent Records to Clemson’s IR — Highlighting the University’s Output,” VTechWorks, Virginia Tech’s institutional repository, now offers a similar collection, Virginia Tech Patents. The collection contains 645 U.S. Patents assigned to Virginia Tech at the time of patent application. The dates of issuance span 1919-2016. The collection’s display is customized with fields, search filters, and facets particular to patents, such as patent type, inventor, assignee, patent and application numbers, and patent classifications. Our motivation for creating the collection was that a sizeable collection of useful public domain content could be harvested programmatically and that it provides an opportunity to spotlight how Virginia Tech “invents the future.”

To enable other repositories to develop a similar collection, we offer our software, Patent-Harvest, in a GitHub repository. Patent-Harvest contains a Java program written to harvest all patents with Virginia Tech as the assignee. It can be adapted to harvest patents and associated files for other organizations or search parameters.

The harvesting program uses the PatentsView API to retrieve relevant metadata for all Virginia Tech patents and outputs a CSV spreadsheet. If desired, all the corresponding files for each patent are also downloaded and logically renamed. Since most United States patent documents are image-only PDFs, a script is included that uses optical character recognition to read text content and embed it in the patent documents. This makes the text of the patent documents searchable, but doesn’t change how they appear to the reader.

Happy Open Education Week! 2017 marked the fourth year of celebrating international Open Education Week at Virginia Tech. The Open Education Week planning committee set goals to meet felt needs of faculty on campus and to encourage student communication with faculty regarding the impact of learning resources on student learning.

Cost is always an issue. The committee agreed that we wanted to do something more positive than focus on barriers to learning, so we chose the theme “The Potential of Open Education.” What is Open Education anyway? Open Education includes pedagogies, practices, and resources which reduce barriers to learning. “Open Education combines the traditions of knowledge sharing and creation with 21st century technology to create a vast pool of openly shared educational resources, while harnessing today’s collaborative spirit to develop educational approaches that are more responsive to learner’s needs.” Source: Open Education Consortium

Two faculty and graduate student oriented events featured local and invited speakers, including live and live-streamed:

Virginia Tech’s Student Government Association (SGA) designed the Open Education Week exhibit to educate and to solicit visitor input. The interactive exhibit features a range of required student learning materials including textbooks, homework access codes, software, and clickers, visual representations of data related to course material costs and student responses, information about open education options, a new Creative Commons brochure, CC stickers, and several interactive features. Students also have the opportunity to write a personalized message on an SGA-designed postcard to their professor, department head, or whomever they want to contact.

SGA also hosted a Multimedia Event. This student led engagement event featured multiple interactive stations where students could discuss, answer questions, take pictures, and write postcards. Two wordcloud prompts in particular were telling: “Where would your money go if you didn’t have to buy textbooks” — with the top two answers by far reflecting daily living expenses — “food” and “rent.”

Students were also asked to reflect on how they avoid buying full price textbooks. Responses included “Rent [textbooks],” “go without,” “hope for the best,” “borrow them from a friend,” and “buy used.”